Browse

The era between empire and communism is routinely portrayed as a catastrophic interlude in China's modern history, but this book shows instead that the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a qualitatively unprecedented trend towards openness. The book argues that the years from 1900 to 1949 were characterised at all levels of society by engagement with the world, and that the pursuit of openness was particularly evident in four areas: in governance and the advance of the rule of law and of newly acquired liberties; in freedom of movement in and out of the country; in open minds thriving on ideas from the humanities and sciences; and in open markets and sustained growth in the economy. Freedom of association, freedom to travel, freedom of religion, freedom to trade, and relative freedom of speech wrought profound changes in the texture of everyday life. While globalisation itself was a vector of cultural diversification, pre-existing constellations of ideas, practices and institutions did not simply vanish on contact with the rest of the world, but on the contrary expanded even further, just as much as local industries diversified thanks to their inclusion into a much larger global market. Arguably the country was at its most diverse in its entire history on the eve of World War II — in terms of politics, society, culture, and the economy.

This book brings studies of modern Thai history and culture into dialogue with debates in comparative intellectual history, Asian cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. It takes Thai Studies in new directions through case studies of the cultural hybridity and ambivalences that have emerged from the manifold interactions between Siam/Thailand and the West from 1850 to the present day. The central aims of the book are to critique notions of Thai “uniqueness” or “exceptionalism” and locate Thai Studies in a broader, comparative perspective by arguing that modern Siam/Thailand needs to be understood as a semicolonial society. In contrast to conservative nationalist and royalist accounts of Thai history and culture, which resist comparing the country to its once-colonized Asian neighbours, this book's contributors highlight the value of postcolonial analysis in understanding the complexly ambiguous, interstitial, liminal, and hybrid character of Thai/Western cultural interrelationships. At the same time, by pointing to the distinctive position of semicolonial societies in the Western-dominated world order, the chapters in the book make significant contributions to developing the critical theoretical perspectives of international cultural studies. The contributors demonstrate how the disciplines of history, anthropology, political science, film and cultural studies all enhance these contestations in intersecting ways, and across different historical moments. Each of the chapters raises manifold themes and questions regarding the nature of intercultural exchange, interrogated through theoretically critical lenses.

The tuberculosis epidemic of Meiji and Taishō helped to define the relationship between Japan’s government and the foreign, Protestant nondenominational evangelist organizations and individuals who had recently arrived on the archipelago. For those willing to undertake medical missionary work, particularly concerning public health issues that the government chose to ignore, tuberculosis could have provided an arena in which to prove both utility to the nation and enthusiasm for Japan’s industrial modernization, a moral enterprise. Yet theirs was also a utilitarian mission—more converts would mean more funds for the mission, either from the pockets of the recently converted or from foreign supporters who were bolstered by promising statistics. The victims of the tuberculosis epidemic were pawns in the interactions between the Japanese government and foreign evangelists, as their existence (physical and spiritual) was often used to mediate the relationship between their government and their caretakers. These potential caretakers included the Y.M.C.A., The Salvation Army, and individuals who formerly fell under the auspices of each. These organizations, and the Japanese government, at whose behest they often worked, parsed and differentiate the value of human life medically, politically, culturally, and in terms of gender, labor, and utility.

This revised edition collects in one place the chapters from the three volumes of Ancestral Images originally published in 1979, 1980 and 1981. The 120 chapters and photographs explore everyday life, customs and rituals in Hong Kong's rural New Territories. They investigate religion, food, language, history, festivals, family, strange happenings and clan warfare. The book documents much that can no longer be found. But it also provides an understanding of a world which has not yet entirely disappeared, and which still forms the background of life in modern urban Hong Kong and its neighbouring cities. Esoteric nuggets of information are scattered through the book: How do you ascend a pagoda with no staircase? How can you marry without attending the wedding? When is it wrong to buy a book? The text answers these and many other questions in this well-rounded picture of a vibrant, quirky people painted with affection and informed by many years of scholarship and research.

After the Second World War, the Australian military prosecuted almost a thousand alleged Japanese war criminals. These prosecutions were not only an attempt to punish Japan for its wartime militarism, but also a move to exert influence over the future course of Japanese society, politics, and foreign policy, as well as to cement Australia’s position in the Pacific as a regional power. During the Allied occupation of Japan (1945-52), Australia energetically pursued Japanese war criminals, and took a tough stance on Japan in general. The U.S. authorities, who dominated the Occupation, initially took the same line. As the Cold War in Asia intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, the U.S. government ceased to consider Japan a threat to Pacific security, and instead began to cultivate Japan as a potential democratic ally against communism. By the end of the Occupation, U.S. officials were firmly committed to pursuing good relations with the Japanese government. Gradually, in the 1950s, the Australian government came to share the U.S. view of Japan. As Japan shifted in official thinking from being a former foe, to a potential economic and political partner, concerns about the guilt of individual Japanese soldiers made way for pragmatism and political gain. The war criminals became entangled with Australian moves to establish good relations with Japan, and to draw the U.S. into a close alliance. Variations to their sentences - through repatriation to Japan, and later through parole or other forms of early release - became diplomatic bargaining chips. By the end of 1957, all of the surviving war criminals prosecuted by Australia had been released.

This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia.

For more than four centuries, Macau was the center of Portuguese trade and culture on the South China Coast. Until the founding of Hong Kong and the opening of other ports in the 1840s, it was also the main gateway to China for independent British merchants and their only place of permanent residence. Drawing extensively on Portuguese as well as British sources, The British Presence in Macau traces Anglo-Portuguese relations in South China from the first arrival of English trading ships in the 1630s to the establishment of factories at Canton, the beginnings of the opium trade, and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Longstanding allies in the West, the British and Portuguese pursued more complex relations in the East, as trading interests clashed under a Chinese imperial system and as the British increasingly asserted their power as “a community in search of a colony.”

This book brings together accounts of journeys and cross-cultural experiences by Chinese travelers in the late nineteenth century with those of more recent migrants and diasporic Chinese subjects in a number of global locations.

This book recounts how one woman's hope of building a new China gradually turned to disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, reflecting the minds of China's intellectuals at the time. The book relates personal experiences in China from 1949 to the present, detailing numerous political movements, including the devastating experiences of the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book went to the mainland with her husband against the flow of the mass exodus in 1949 to help to build a new China. After her husband was labeled a “Rightist,” they were banished to the countryside for eight long years, while their four children were sent to different parts of the country to do manual labor.

Charity is common to diaspora communities the world over, from Armenian diaspora networks to Zimbabwean ones, but the forms charitable activity takes vary across communities and sites of settlement. What was distinctive about Chinese diaspora charity? This volume explores the history of charity among overseas Chinese during the century from 1850 to 1949 with a particular focus on the Cantonese "Gold Rush" communities of the Pacific rim, a loosely integrated network of émigrés from Cantonese-speaking counties in Guangdong Province, centering on colonial Hong Kong where people lived, worked and moved among English-speaking settler societies of North America and Oceania. The Cantonese Pacific was distinguished from fabled Nanyang communities of Southeast Asia in a number of ways and the forms their charity assumed were equally distinctive. In addition to traditional functions, charity served as a medium of cross-cultural negotiation with dominant Anglo-settler societies of the Pacific. Community leaders worked through civic associations to pioneer new models of public charity to demand recognition of Chinese immigrants as equal citizens in their host societies. Their charitable innovations were shaped by their host societies in turn, exemplified by women's role in charitable activities from the early decades of the 20^th century. By focusing on charitable practices in the Cantonese diaspora over a century of trans-Pacific migration, this collection sheds new light on the history of charity in the Chinese diaspora, including institutional innovations not apparent within China itself, and on the place of the Chinese diaspora in the wider history of charity and philanthropy.

In The Classical Gardens of Shanghai, Shelly Bryant looks at five of Shanghai’s remaining classical gardens through their origins, changing fortunes, restorations, and links to a wider Chinese aesthetic. Shanghai’s classical gardens are as much text as space; they exist in art, poetry, and literature as much as in stone, rock, and earth. But these gardens have not remained static entities. Rather, they have been remodelled constantly since their inception. This book reflects this process within the constancy of traditional Chinese horticulture and reveals Shanghai’s remaining classical gardens as places representing wealth and social status, social and dynastic shifts, through falling family fortunes and political revolutions to search for a recovery of China’s ancient culture in the modern day.

This book provides an alternative lens for looking into Hong Kong's history by breaking away from the usual colonial and nationalist interpretations. Drawing on both English and Chinese sources, the author argues that, from the early colonial era, colonial power has been extensively shared between colonizers and the Chinese who chose to work with them. This exploration of the form of colonial power includes critical discussions of various cultural and institutional aspects, looking into such issues as education, language use, political ideologies, and other cultural and political concerns. These considerations permit the author to shed new light from a historical perspective on the complex and hotly debated question of Hong Kong identity. But it is not written just out of an interest in things of the past. Rather, the arguments of this book shed new light on some current issues of major relevance to post-colonial Hong Kong. The book makes critical use of post-colonial approaches, and demonstrates that Hong Kong is an important case for all interested in examining the colonial experience in East Asia.

Based on extensive ethnographic work, Comfort Women Activism examines how women activists in Japan, Japanese and Koreans, have come to understand the comfort women issue. The movement in Japan has evolved as part of transnational activism, in which the activists in Japan play a crucial role in lobbying legislators and generating public opinion conducive to the state’s compensation. By presenting the activists’ narratives, the book illuminates the nuanced understandings of the issue they have developed through face-to-face communication with survivors. Their diverse voices shed light on the multifaceted aspects of the movement. The book also provides an account of the movement’s thirty-year history and an overview of scholarly arguments presented in Japanese. Many of the activists’ thoughts are relevant to scholarly debates on the comfort women issue, exemplifying, substantiating, and commenting on what researchers have said. By measuring the activist narratives against scholarly debates, the book argues that comfort women activism in Japan is a new form of feminism characterized by critical historical consciousness; the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and class; mutual transformation; and transnational solidarity. Most importantly, it argues that women activists in Japan, a former colonial empire, have avoided falling into imperialist feminism through the act of listening to survivors wholeheartedly.

Land was always at the centre of life in Hong Kong's rural New Territories: it sustained livelihoods and lineages and, for some, was a route to power. Villagers managed their land according to customs that were often at odds with formal Chinese law. British rule, 1898–1997, added complications by assimilating traditional practices into a Western legal system. Custom, Land and Livelihood in Rural South China explores land ownership in the New Territories, analysing over a hundred surviving land deeds from the late Ch'ing Dynasty to recent times, which are transcribed in full and translated into English. Together with other sources collected by the author during 30 years of research, these deeds yield information on all aspects of traditional village life – from raising families and making a living to coping with intruders – and evoke a view of the world which, despite decades of urbanisation, still has resonance today.

The forts built from the early seventeenth century onwards, the ships that defended Macau's waters, the weapons that armed the facilities and the soldiers and sailors who manned them all are detailed in this book. These forts, cannon and small arms were a familiar part of society for hundreds of years, and a significant part of Macau's heritage. Macau is fortunate in having so many artifacts remaining, but very little research has been done on them. The book addresses this gap by identifying many rare and unique weapons. More than 200 illustrations, many in color, serve as a visual record of what has survived. Some of the forts are included among Macau's World Heritage sites.

Studying malaria in modern East Asia in the context of the global history of the disease, this book fills an important gap in our understanding of the cultural, social, economic, and political dimensions of the relationship between malaria and human society in a region which has often been neglected by historians of the disease. The authors examine the development and consequences of various anti-malaria strategies in Hong Kong, Okinawa, Taiwan, mainland China, and East Asia as a whole. The British and Japanese colonial models of disease control are explored, as is the later American technological model of DDT residue spraying, promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation which played a significant role in the global anti-malaria campaign and the development of public health in Asia. In the post- World War II period, the use of DDT and international political and economic interests helped to shape anti-malaria policies of the Nationalist government in Taiwan. In mainland China, the Beijing government's mass mobilization and primary health care model of anti-malaria control has given way to new strategies as recent changes in the health care system have affected anti-malaria efforts and public health developments. This book illuminates an important and largely unexplored dimension of the history of malaria: the interplay of the state (colonial or sovereign), international interests, new medical knowledge and technology, changing concepts of health and disease, as well as local society in the formulation and implementation of anti-malaria policies.

While Hong Kong's spectacular economic growth and political development have been well documented, the social and cultural lives of the ordinary people swept up in the changes have not found a significant voice. Through the personal experiences of the author of this book and those around him, this book gives a voice to people whose lives have been profoundly affected by the dramatic changes, as Hong Kong transitioned from an entrepôt to an international financial centre and from a colony to become a part of China. The book contributes to the ongoing search for Hong Kong identity in the Special Administrative Region.

Numerous personality clashes and financial and other intrigues surrounded the early efforts to set up an observatory in Hong Kong. Blending personalities, politics, and practicalities of studying the weather, this book provides insights into the public and private controversies growing out of responses to and responsibilities involved in the protection of life and property. This portrait is set firmly in the context of the history of Hong Kong as a British colony on the China Coast and its role as a burgeoning commercial port within the trading complex of the Empire. It brings to life many of the people and institutions in Hong Kong and elsewhere on the development of meteorology on the China Coast. Dr. William Doberck, who became the founding director of the new Observatory, played a crucial role in its development during most of forty years covered by this book. Doberck was an astronomer with little interest in meteorology and a penchant for not suffering gladly those whom he considered to be his inferiors. The book follows many snippets of scandal concerning Doberck and his often cantankerous relationship with his employers and the other stakeholders in the Colony. In later chapters, the book explores the complex dynamics of the contentious interactions between Doberck and the Jesuits in charge of the Manila and Zikawei Observatories. The storms that rage in the narrative as well as the tragedy of the very real storm of 1906 illustrate the drama that played out both locally and internationally in terms of jealousies, rivalries, and many attendant charges and counter-charges animating the controversy.

In December 1846, the Keying, a Chinese junk purchased by British investors, set sail from Hong Kong for London. Named after the Chinese Imperial Commissioner who had signed away Hong Kong to the British, manned by a Chinese and European crew, and carrying a travelling exhibition of Chinese items, the Keying had a troubled voyage. After quarrels on the way and a diversion to New York, culminating in a legal dispute over arrears of wages for Chinese members of the crew, it finally reached London in 1848, where it went on exhibition on the River Thames until 1853. It was then auctioned off, towed to Liverpool, and finally broken up. This book tells a story of missed opportunities, with an erratic course, overambitious aims, and achievements born of lucky breaks—a microcosm, in fact, of early Hong Kong and of the relations between China and the West.

Piracy and smuggling are as great a problem today as they were several hundreds of years ago. The studies in this book describe and analyze piracy and smuggling in the Greater China Seas region from the sixteenth century to the present. Because piracy and smuggling involve complex historical processes that are still evolving, to fully understand contemporary problems it is important to place them in larger historical and comparative perspectives. The essays in this book add to the scholarship on East and Southeast Asian history, and in particular to the maritime history of the region we call the Greater China Seas. This is the first book to analyze the whole region from Japan to Southeast Asia as a single, integrated historical and geographical area. The book departs from the standard terra centered histories to place the seas at the center rather than at the margins of our inquiries. By focusing on the water we are better able to stitch together the diverse histories of Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. The chapters in this anthology show that, although often dismissed as historically unimportant, pirates and smugglers have in fact played significant roles in the development of the modern world.